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Jeff Bezos

Why It’s Prime Time To Boycott Amazon

July 15, 2019 By Valerie Vande Panne,  Independentmediainstitute.org , , ,
Are you ready to divest from Amazon Prime? How about Whole Foods? If the idea makes you break into a nervous cold sweat, no worries. You don’t need to divest from either. Yet. That’s the idea behind non-profit Threshold’s new campaign, Cancel Prime. The idea is for people to pledge to cancel their Prime accounts and stop shopping at Whole Foods—when there is a critical mass of people who will divest together.

6,000 Amazon Employees, Including A VP And Directors, Are Now Calling On Jeff Bezos To Stop Automating Oil Extraction

April 30, 2019 Brian Merchant, Gizmodo.com , , , ,
On Monday, a group of Amazon employees began circulating an open letter that calls on CEO Jeff Bezos and the board of directors to adopt a companywide plan to address climate change. By Wednesday, over 3,500 Amazoners had signed on. By Friday, that number had surpassed 6,000—meaning a number equivalent to about 1/10th of the company’s entire corporate workforce had publicly added their names. And those names are still rolling in. One of the latest names belongs to Tim Bray, a VP and Distinguished Engineer who, per his LinkedIn profile, is “an AWS geek at Amazon.com.”

Amazon’s Underbelly 3.0: Lobbying And Bribing To Secure Market Dominance

April 1, 2019 Chris Paulis, Occupy.com , ,
Amazon has continued to expand its influence on policy and on government over the past decade. We laud Jeff Bezos as the richest man in the world and how he rose to the top by his own bootstraps. Many imagine him as a self-starter, an entrepreneur, a visionary. But the fact remains that Jeff has used his vast wealth to influence policy and laws to favor his business practices. Amazon has pushed others aside in order to procure its vast influence on politics and legislation. Granted, Amazon is not alone in this endeavor. It's no secret that corporations endlessly lobby to get what they want...

Minnesota Amazon Workers Walk Off The Job Over Speed-Up

March 25, 2019 Joe DeManuelle-Hall, Labornotes.org , , , ,
After yet another speed-up in a workplace notorious for its lightning pace of work, workers at a Minnesota Amazon warehouse walked off the night shift for three hours. The March 7 walkout at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota, was these workers’ second job action in three months. The strikers work in the stow department, shelving items after they have been unloaded from inbound trucks and processed. Once shelved, the merchandise is then compiled into customer orders by pickers.

Cries Of ‘Shame!’ Heard At Arlington County, Va. Hearing As Officials Approve $23M In Incentives For Amazon

March 18, 2019 By Julia Conley, Commondreams.org , ,
"You claim Arlington is a place for all, for immigrants, for equality, [and] clamor for the attention of a company that does the opposite." Anti-Amazon protesters in Arlington County, Virginia were outraged Saturday after the county board dismissed outright their concerns over the corporate giant's decision to build a headquarters in Crystal City—voting unanimously to approve $23 million in tax incentives for the company. The 5-0 vote followed hours of testimony by Amazon representatives, supporters, and opponents of the plan, with critics arguing that the trillion-dollar company has no need for financial incentives and that its presence in Crystal City will negatively impact lower-income residents and public services.

Without Amazon, New York Can Now Do Economic Development Right

February 27, 2019 By Isaiah J. Poole, Commondreams.org , , , ,
Now that activists in New York City successfully chased Amazon and its “HQ2” plan out of New York City, there is a new challenge: Can the organizers and elected leaders who successfully blocked the kind of economic development they opposed bring about the kind of economic development they want? That was a question that Cheyenna Weber, general coordinator for the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City, was wrestling with hours after Amazon announced on Thursday that it was canceling a planned complex in Long Island City, Queens that they said would bring 25,000 jobs to the area.

Amazon Won’t Pay A Dime In Federal Taxes This Year

February 18, 2019 By Jacob Sugarman, Truthdig.com , , ,
Amazon won’t pay a dime in federal taxes this year—just as it didn’t pay a dime in federal taxes the year before. According to a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which examined Amazon’s public filings, the online retailer reported a $129 million federal income tax rebate for 2018—good for a tax rate of negative 1 percent, or 22 percent below the federal corporate income tax rate. Amazon’s profits this year were $11.2 billion versus $5.6 billion in 2017. As of last September, the company was valued at over $1 trillion.

Amazon’s Decision To Pull Out Of NYC Is A Massive Blow To Corporate Welfare

February 16, 2019 David Dayen, Inthesetimes.com , , ,
Amazon announced Thursday the company has canceled its bid to acquire nearly $3 billion in public dollars to locate a facility in New York City—the most substantial setback for corporate welfare in recent memory.  Significantly, Amazon states in its announcement of the decision that it will continue to expand its workforce in the New York City area, up from the 5,000 workers the company already employs in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island. In other words, Amazon still plans to maintain a headquarters-sized presence in New York, the nation’s financial and economic hub. It just couldn’t win the political battle to obtain billions of dollars in subsidies from it.

Feeling Unwelcome, Amazon Ditches Plans For New York Hub

February 15, 2019 Jonathan Allen and David Shepardson, Reuters.com , ,
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc abruptly scrapped plans to build a major outpost in New York that could have created 25,000 jobs, blaming opposition from local leaders upset by the nearly $3 billion in incentives promised by state and city politicians. The company said on Thursday it did not see consistently “positive, collaborative” relationships with state and local officials. Opponents of the project feared congestion and higher rents in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, and objected to handing billions in incentives to a company run by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man.

Time For A Maximum Income: Jeff Bezos Has Enough

January 1, 2019 By Mark Engler, Dissentmagazine.org , , ,
For Republican members of Congress and cable news pundits, a cap on the earnings of the super rich might sound like a dystopian nightmare. Yet, as author Sam Pizzigati argues in his new book, The Case for a Maximum Wage, those who are not ardent free marketeers should give the idea some serious consideration—not only as a desirable policy, but also one that might be more practical than some imagine.

“Alexa, Drop A Bomb”: Amazon Wants In On US Warfare

December 17, 2018 Nick Mottern, Truthout.org , , ,
Amazon is seeking to build a global “brain” for the Pentagon called JEDI, a weapon of unprecedented surveillance and killing power, a profoundly aggressive weapon that should not be allowed to be created. Founded in 1994 as an online book seller, Amazon is now the world’s largest online retailer, with more than 300 million customers worldwide, and net sales of $178 billion in 2017. Amazon has built a vast, globally distributed data storage capacity and sophisticated artificial intelligence programs to propel its retail business that it hopes to use to win a $10 billion Pentagon contract to create the aforementioned “brain” that goes by the project name Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, a moniker obviously concocted to yield the Star Wars acronym — JEDI.

Amazon’s Billion-Dollar Shakedown Of America’s Cities

November 16, 2018 By Jacob Sugarman, Truthdig.com , , ,
If one required reminding of the Democratic Party’s complete capitulation to corporate interests, to say nothing of the country’s as a whole, he or she need only have listened to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s address on Tuesday. “One of the biggest companies on earth next to the biggest public housing development in the United States,” he told reporters during a joint press conference with Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “The synergy is going to be extraordinary.” The company in question is Amazon, which confirmed earlier that morning that Long Island City, Queens, will become the site of its second headquarters (a third headquarters will be located in northern Virginia).

What Can Be Done To Stop Amazon From Devouring Everything?

November 3, 2018 Neil Demause, Gothamist.com , ,
There are many, many reasons to want to avoid making purchases from Amazon. The company is owned by an anti-union zealot, is largely responsible for the death of brick and mortar stores by selling products at a loss to undercut them, abuses its white-collar employees while outsourcing its blue-collar ones to unaccountable subcontractors, evades collecting sales taxes on its third-party vendors, and has built unprecedented secret databases on you and your shopping habits. (It’s unclear as yet how much Amazon’s just-announced $15-an-hour minimum wage will ease the pain of toiling in its warehouses.) And that's without even getting into Bezos's attempts to extort several billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies from whichever city he picks to host his new second headquarters...

Bezos And Bipartisanship: Voting Vets Not Always The Best

October 31, 2018 Suzanne Gordon, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Veterans running for office have never had a stronger personal brand or more political backing. To hold onto or win back seats in Congress, both major parties have recruited many candidates whose resume includes past military service. Across the political spectrum, various Super PACs have backed this effort to increase the veteran population on Capitol Hill. And one such group, the With Honor Fund, claims that electing more vets will help restore “public trust” in Congress and reduce “the extreme partisanship that has corroded our national legislature.”

Amazon Concedes $15 Floor Wage, Bernie Sanders Plays Minor Role In Significant Victory

October 6, 2018 Bruce A. Dixon, Blackagendareport.com , , , ,
Amazon’s announcement last week that it would boost the wages of its lowest paid workers to $15 an hour in time for this year’s holiday rush, was not a generous gift from its owner Jeff Bezos, reportedly the wealthiest man on earth. It was also not, as some would like us to believe, a miracle wrought by the intervention of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. It was a strategic concession on the part of Amazon in the face of its own public relations needs, competitive pressures from its near-peers, pressure from transnational cooperation among its unionized European workforce, and to a minor degree the STOP BEZOS bill introduced by Sanders which proposes to tax large corporations for the amount their employees use in federal aid programs.
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